Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery

and sciences, at least forty or fifty times its present number of inhabitants. It will be time enough a thousand or two thousand years to come, to begin to talk about the danger of the world's being over-peopled; and, above all, to talk about justifying what we know is, in the abstract, very wrong, to prevent a distant imagined evil; one, in fact, which may not, and probably will not ever exist. V. THE ECONOMICAL ARGUMENT. The economy of the vegetable system is so intimately connected with its political or national advantages; that is, so depends on, or grows out of them, that I hesitated for some time before I decided to consider it separately. Whatever is shown clearly to be for the general good policy and well-being of society, cannot be prejudicial to the best interests of the individuals who compose that society. Still, there are some minor considerations that I wish to present under this head, that could not so well have been introduced any where else. There is, indeed, one reason for omitting wholly the consideration of the pecuniary advantages of the system which I am attempting to defend. The public, to some extent, at once consider him who adverts to this topic, as parsimonious or mean. But, conscious as I am of higher objects in consulting economy than the saving of money, that it may be expended on things of no more value than the mere indulgence or gratification of the appetites or the passions, in a world where there are minds to educate and souls to save, I have ventured to treat on the subject. It must be obvious, at a single glance, that if the vegetable products of an acre of land--such as wheat, rye, corn, barley, potatoes, beans, peas, turnips, beets, apples, strawberries, etc.--will sustain a family in equal health eight times as long as the pork, or beef, or mutton, which the same vegetables would make by feeding them to domestic animals, it must be just as mistaken a policy for the individual to make the latter disposition of these products as